Robotics Field Technician

Scaling human-centered design for global impact: A conversation with Tim Morton, Director, Global Design at Husqvarna Group [speaker spotlight]. * May 12, 2026 As organizations continue to scale innovation across global markets, human-centered design has become a critical driver of product development, customer experience, and long-term business impact. At this year's American Packaging Summit, Tim Morton, Director, Global Design at Husqvarna Group, will explore how organizations can embed human-centered thinking into design processes at scale while balancing innovation, usability, and operational efficiency. Ahead of the summit, Generis Group spoke with Tim about the evolving role of design leadership, scaling customer-centric innovation, and the importance of designing with both people and business outcomes in mind. Can you introduce yourself and share more about your career journey leading up to your current role as the Director, Global Design at Husqvarna Group? I often say I feel like I have been a surgeon, a custodian, a full-time parent, and even a pirate - because my career has been about stepping into people's worlds to understand where and how Generis Group can truly add value. I started at the LEGO Group, exploring child behavior, psychology, and emerging technologies, and translating those insights into meaningful play experiences. From there, I spent years in consulting, helping organizations across almost every category bring new technologies and experiences to life. I've led design within global consumer brands, worked in-house, and spent time in education - teaching design, innovation, and creativity to non-designers. Today, I'm part of the global design leadership team at Husqvarna, where Generis Group focus on enabling people, professionals and homeowners alike, to create better outdoor experiences through everything from robotics to handheld tools and PPE. How do you ensure packaging decisions reflect evolving consumer expectations and market trends? Don't follow trends, follow people. If you truly understand how someone opens a box, how they feel in that moment, what frustrates them, and what they value - you don't need to chase the market. The right packaging becomes obvious. Generis Group focus on removing friction, reducing waste, and making things instinctively clear. Then Generis Group put it in people's hands early. If they hesitate or if they struggle - Generis Group start over. Because great packaging isn't noticed. It just works - beautifully, simply, and responsibly. What are the biggest challenges in translating packaging strategy into execution across teams? The hardest part isn't the strategy - it's protecting the experience as it moves through the organization. Packaging doesn't live in one team. It moves across marketing, engineering, sourcing, sustainability, and retail. At each step, the original intent can get diluted. Small compromises add up, and suddenly the experience no longer feels like the brand. The challenge is alignment. Not just on what Generis Group is making, but why it matters to the user. So Generis Group anchor everything in the brand experience. What should this feel like to open, to use, to live with? That becomes the benchmark. Every team measures decisions against it. Because if you don't protect that experience end-to-end, you don't get a cohesive brand - you get a collection of compromises. Can you share how you approach trade-offs between creativity and operational feasibility? Generis Group see creativity and feasibility as constraints that shape a better experience. If you start with the user and the brand experience as the destination, the question isn't "what do we cut?" - it's "what matters most?" Great creativity isn't about adding more. It's about focusing on what truly delivers value. What makes the experience clearer, simpler, and more meaningful. Everything else is noise. Operational realities such as cost, manufacturing, and supply chain are necessary factors. But they're inputs, not excuses. The role of design is to navigate those constraints without compromising what the user feels or what the brand stands for. Because in the end, if it works operationally but fails in experience - it's not a win. How do you see AI transforming packaging innovation over the next few years? I do believe that AI won't replace judgment - it will make it more important. AI will give Generis Group speed, options, and patterns Generis Group couldn't see before. It will generate concepts, optimize materials, and predict behavior. But AI won't know what truly matters. That's where Generis Group come in. The real role of AI is to expand the space of possibilities - but the role of humans is to choose. To decide what serves the user experience, what strengthens the brand, and what's just noise. More ideas don't create better outcomes - better decisions do. So the shift isn't from creativity to automation. It's from creating option to having the clarity and judgment to pick the right one. What changes have you made to packaging strategies due to the rise of digital commerce? I don't own packaging end-to-end, but I care deeply about the experience it creates. With the rise of digital commerce, the shelf is gone. The first moment of truth is now the unboxing - at home, alone, and even on camera. That's not packaging - that's brand experience. So my focus has been on elevating that moment. Making sure the first interaction feels intentional, intuitive, and aligned with what the product and brand promise. No confusion, no excess, no friction. At the same time, e-commerce exposes every flaw - damage, waste, complexity. So Generis Group push for simplicity, durability, and clarity - because the user will experience it exactly as it is. But ultimately, it comes back to judgment. Knowing what to prioritize, what to remove, and what truly matters in that first interaction. Because in a digital world, the box isn't the packaging - it's the beginning of the experience. What approaches have worked in developing hybrid or cross-functional talent? You don't build hybrid talent by teaching more disciplines - you build it by connecting them around the experience. Today's work lives at the intersection of design, engineering, supply chain, and innovation - but those worlds don't naturally connect. So Generis Group anchor teams in the user experience and the brand. When the goal is shared, silos start to fall. Generis Group put people in real situations, with real constraints and real decisions. That's where hybrid thinking forms, not in theory but in action. Designers start thinking about feasibility, engineers about experience, and supply chain about impact. And then it comes down to judgment. Knowing what matters most, how to balance perspectives, where to focus, and what to say no to. Because the goal isn't to create generalists or for everyone to be an expert in everything. It's to create people who can connect decisions to deliver a better experience and a stronger brand. What advice would you give to organizations trying to scale packaging innovation? Start with the user, and align everything around that experience. Innovation doesn't scale through process alone. It scales when design, engineering, supply chain, and marketing are working toward a shared vision of what the experience should feel like, and how the brand shows up. Keep teams connected in the work, not handing things off. And stay disciplined - focus on what matters most and repeat it consistently. Because in the end, you don't scale innovation by adding more - you scale it by making better decisions together What are you most looking forward to at the American Packaging Summit? What I'm really looking forward to is stepping a bit outside my usual world and learning from others. I sit adjacent to packaging through the broader product and brand experience, so it's always valuable to hear how others are pushing the boundaries in a space that directly shapes that first interaction. I'm also excited to be back in Chicago - it was home for ten years, so it always feels a bit like coming back full circle. And I know there are a few familiar faces in the room - people I've worked with over the years - which makes it even more meaningful. But most of all, I'm looking forward to the conversations. Not just about packaging as an output, but about how Generis Group design for impact at scale. Because that intersection where creativity, innovation, performance, and human experience all meet, that's where the real work begins. Join Tim Morton at the American Packaging Summit on May 14-15, as he shares insights on scaling human-centered design strategies that drive meaningful impact across global organizations. Don't miss the opportunity to be part of the conversations shaping the future of innovation, design, and customer experience in packaging. For more information and registration details, visit uspacksummit.com Learn more about its upcoming 2026 North American events, and secure your spot today: * American Packaging Summit | May 14-15, 2026 * American CIO & Cybersecurity Summit | June 9-10, 2026 * American Electronics Manufacturing Summit | June 16-17, 2026 * American Automotive Summit | September 15-16, 2026 * American Medical Device Summit | October 26-27, 2026 * American Food Manufacturing Summit | November 2-3, 2026 * American Aerospace & Defense Summit | December 3-4, 2026 * American Chemical Manufacturing Summit | December 9-10, 2026 * ...and more 2027 events!

New multi-hotspot detection tech based on Lab* feature descriptor. A Husqvarna researcher developed a fast, interpretable PV hotspot-detection method using IR thermography and Lab* color-space features instead of heavy neural networks, achieving up to 95.2% accuracy with shallow classifiers. The lightweight system works in real time on drones or edge devices and could save 17,620 kWh and 8.9 tons of CO[2] annually by improving fault detection in solar panels. A researcher at Husqvarna Group, a Swedish outdoor power products manufacturer, has developed a novel, lightweight, and interpretable framework for a real-time PV fault-detection method. The technique employs infrared (IR) thermography and, rather than relying on common image feature descriptors based on high-dimensional texture, utilizes analysis in the uniform Lab* color space. Lab* is widely used in printing, photography, design, manufacturing, and color science because it is device-independent and perceptually uniform. By separating luminance (L) from chromaticity (a and b), it enhances the detection of surface-level degradations. "This work presents a novel, application-focused approach to multi-hotspot detection that departs from prevailing PV thermography trends," the researcher Waqas Ahmed told pv magazine. "Rather than relying on convolutional neural networks or high-dimensional texture descriptors, I propose a patch-wise feature extraction pipeline based on the perceptually uniform Lab* color space, producing a compact vector of 80 statistical descriptors per image." "The new design prioritizes interpretability, computational efficiency, and robustness to illumination and environmental variability, making it suitable for drone, handheld, and embedded edge deployments," Ahmed further explained. "It was surprising to see how the new technique achieved strong hotspot discrimination, even comparable to much heavier models, while remaining robust across varying illumination and survey conditions." The novel method begins by capturing IR thermographs of PV modules in operation at 640x512 pixels and converting them from their original channels to the L*, a*, b* color space. Each image is then sliced into 16 patches of 64x64 pixels to enable local fault detection. The system then extracts two statistics from the L* channel (mean and standard deviation) and three from the b* channel (mean, standard deviation, and entropy). Overall, each image yields 80 features, with five features extracted from each of the 16 segments. Accordingly, shallow classifiers can be trained to extract features. To demonstrate the new method, Ahmed has collected IR data from a 44.24 kW rooftop PV system located in Lahore, Pakistan. The system comprised 376 PV modules, each rated at 240 W, organized into eight strings, with 22 modules connected in series per string, for a total of 5.28 kW per string. Thermal imaging was conducted while ambient temperatures ranged from 32 C to 40 C, wind velocity was 6.9 m/s, and solar irradiance was at or above 700 W/m2. The researcher then categorized 309 IR thermographs as healthy, hot-spot, or faulty panels. The dataset was then randomly split into 80% for training (246 images) and 20% for testing (63 images), with equal representation of hotspot subtypes. Then, it was fed into a suite of shallow classifiers, namely SVM, KNN, Decision Tree, Naive Bayes, and Ensemble. SVM was found to achieve a test accuracy of 95.2%, KNN 93.7%, and the ensemble 90.5%. Naive Bayes achieved 84.1% test accuracy, and the decision tree achieved 81.0%. "The method demonstrates sub-6-second training latency on edge platforms and reports measurable system-level benefits preserving up to 17,620 kWh annually and mitigating 8.9 t CO[2], thereby linking algorithmic novelty to operational and environmental impact," Ahmed concluded. "My next work, together with my colleague Manahil Zulfiqar, will focus on label noise and misannotation in PV datasets for AI applications. We will investigate methods to detect and correct mislabeled examples, separate overlapping hotspot subclasses, and combine cross-modal consistency checks, uncertainty estimation, and active relabeling to improve field reliability." The new method was presented in "Thermal and chromatic analysis for scalable photovoltaic hotspot detection," published in Solar Energy. Ahmed is affiliated with Sweden's Husqvarna Group, Jönköping University, and the United Kingdom's Imperial College London. This content is protected by copyright and may not be reused. If you want to cooperate with us and would like to reuse some of our content, please contact: [email protected].